There is something eerie about Central Park at night, the suggestion of a ghostly mist lingering about its less well-lit corners. And there are many of those. It’s probably just car exhaust fumes, but eerie all the same.

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According to Wise, the park harbours a dangerous secret, intimated by none other than Vaux himself, if a letter apparently penned by him in September 1895 is to be believed. It mentions a secret hidden securely in the park, one which can be discovered only by deciphering the papers accompanying Vaux’s letter. According to Vaux, there are men who wished the secret to remain hidden. And being in possession of the secret, Vaux feared for his life. He didn’t have to fear for long: he died two months later. The circumstances of his death by apparent drowning in Brooklyn were never fully explained.

LAKE CITY — Rumors surface every few years. Ever since the historical siting on April 28, 1871, there have been stories about a monster in Lake Pepin.

The Lake City Tourism Bureau has decided to try and find out the truth. The bureau is enlisting the public’s help by offering a $50,000 reward to anyone who can prove the existence of the creature living in Lake Pepin that is commonly referred to as “Pepie.”

The native Dakota people who lived along the Mississippi River were afraid to travel on Lake Pepin in birchbark canoes because of “large creatures” that would surface on the Lake and puncture the thin birchbark skin, according to tourism bureau spokesman Larry Nielson. They would only travel on the lake in the more stoutly made dugout canoes.

Continuing the folkloric monster series, the Japanese Nue had a head like a monkey, the body of a dog, the legs of a tiger and the tail of a snake, according to the wikipedia. They could transform into a cloud-like state and fly and they brought misfortune to people.

CUERO, Texas – Phylis Canion lived in Africa for four years. She’s been a hunter all her life and has the mounted heads of a zebra and other exotic animals in her house to prove it. But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.

“It is one ugly creature,” Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.

“I’ve seen a lot of nasty stuff. I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren’t eaten or carried off — all the blood was drained from them, she said.